Bidding on SaaS upgrades, picky eaters, distributing the future, and more

Hey,

this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to help you level up your entrepreneurial game.

Let's dive into today's ideas, trends, and opportunities.

💡 Social Listening

• Pain Point: “I used to love Digiday. Not anymore. The coverage is mostly politics, diversity+inclusion, and being overworked. I get it, it’s important. But I desperately want a publication that regularly covers media co's, M+A and making $ in the biz. Not 100% focused on the latest thing” - Twitter

• Pain Point: “I'm looking for some remote work for weekends to get some extra money. Do you have any idea where can I find stuff.” - Reddit

• Idea: "I wish there was software you could plug any scientific study into, have it analyze the data, and tell you whether or not there's a high probability it's fraudulent with statistical methods.” - Twitter

• Idea: “I wish there was a way for me to thank the people whose blood I received. They saved my life.” - Reddit

• Idea: “Spirit airlines lets you bid on upgrades. Highest bid gets the upgrade or you can upgrade instantly for a set price in the "good offer" range. Wonder how well it converts... Or how much it bumps AOV.... Could this be used in DTC/SaaS???” - Twitter

🤖 AI Idea of the Week

• The Idea: A Website for Picky Eaters

• The Pain Points: It’s impossible to please everyone, even when it comes to food. There are foodies, vegans, vegetarians, picky eaters, and more. For restaurants, that can make it hard to attract customers.

• The Opportunity: Someone should create a website to aggregate restaurant reviews. This website should be broken down into the different groups of eaters that I listed. You could even rate the restaurant by how well they please the picky eaters.

📈 Trend Signals of the Week

Bubble plugins seem like an amazing market for indie makers right now. You can see on their websites directly how many installs each plugin has. Combined with their pricing this gives a direct revenue estimate. Lots of simple plugins make very solid money right now.

/r/budgetkeebs is a community dedicated to information around budget mechanical keyboards.

👨‍🎓 Framework of the Week

• The Framework: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed"

• Explanation: A huge channel of startup ideas lives in what the top 1% have that the bottom 99% want. Research what futuristic things rich people currently spend a lot of money on. Then brainstorm how you could make them accessible for you and me.

• Examples: I recently learned that rich people spend more than $200k on their beds and one thing that’s included in the price is an annual “massage” from a technician sent by the manufacturer. I have absolutely no idea if this makes any sense but it’s definitely one thing rich people spend a lot of money on that normal people currently don’t have access to.
  
  Here’s another crazy example. Like many rich people Brian Johnson is obsessed with anything that could reverse aging. But what’s really cool is that he shares the results of his various experiments publicly. He lists tons of interesting supplements and gadgets he’s using that are not yet widely available.
  
  A few examples where the framework worked out in the past: private driver: Uber, private chef: Doordash, private vacation home: Airbnb.

💭 Prompt of the Week

• Prompt: What needs can be met by providing an on-the-run service as opposed to a stationary service?

• Examples: Mobile food trucks provide food to workers in a nearby office who cannot afford to take a longer break. On-the-run services for people who need their clothes dry cleaned before they return home from work and don't have time to wait for a traditional dry cleaner. A mobile phone repair service.

💸 Revenue Signals of the Week

brought to you by Revenue Watcher

• Smarcomms reaches $74k MRR. (”Grow your business with social media management & content marketing”)

• Anchor.host grows by 40% in 83 days and now makes $18.5k/month. (”Hassle-free wordpress hosting for web professionals”)

• Roamjs.com grows by +1292.68% in 23 days. Made more than $9k in the past 30 days. (”The most extensive library of open source roam extensions.”)

  • Related note: Roam just announced the launch of their app store. While Roams popularity has somewhat declined recently, this still seems like a huge opportunity.

• Scribble hits $1,785 MRR. (”Transcription for Google Meet.”)

• MGRS Mapper keeps growing steadily and now makes $1620 per month. (”Operational planning tool for junior military leaders.”)

• Budgetsheet makes now $1500/month. (”The Easiest Way To Import Bank Transactions Into Google Sheets.”)

• 3dbook.xyz doubles revenue and now makes $33/month. (”Give some perspective to your book cover.”)

📚 Business Read of the Week

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve most likely seen this thread. But it’s just so good that I had to share it here in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet.

What I love most about it is that it perfectly illustrates that there’s absolutely no need to overcomplicate things at an early stage. Native Deodorant became a $100M brand but it all started with a few orders on Etsy.

Moiz Ali @moizali

I started Native Deodorant by actually buying deodorant sold on Etsy and then white-labeling it. I don’t talk about this story often, but I think it is a good example of how scrappy entrepreneurs can be, and so wanted to share it. Here’s the story: 👇👇👇

📢 Shoutouts

• Unvalidated Ideas is an incredible newsletter I discovered recently. Every week Victor shares 3 super detailed startup ideas. Here’s the latest issue. It’s kind of technical but very good.

• Growth Currency by Dylan Redekop is an amazing newsletter that you should sign up to if you’re interested in starting, growing and monetizing your own newsletter.

• My friend Alex Llull writes the Steal Club newsletter. Kind of a weird name but imo the approach makes a ton of sense. Instead of trying to come up with completely new tactics from scratch, just copy what’s proven to work. Super actionable content creation insights for creators, entrepreneurs & freelancers.

Here’s your chance to be featured in this newsletter.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this report, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. 

And should you come across any interesting businesses, trends, or ideas this week, send them my way!

Have a great week,

Jakob